AMD Fires Rick Bergman Under Cloud of Mystery

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager at AMD has been fired according to HardOCP sources. AMD has given no reason as to why the well seasoned Bergman was leaving his position. It was told to us that Bergman had interviewed for the just-filled CEO position months back at AMD and had been turned down. Since then we have been lead to understand that AMD has lowered the boom on Bergman for not managing the GlobalFoundries relationship properly. Sources tell us that GlobalFoundries is simply not up to the task of supplying AMD its needed parts and Bergman is first in line when it comes to the responsibility of making sure AMD is sourced properly. We understand that Bergman will be the first of the dominoes to fall.

Rick Bergman is senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s products group, with responsibility for delivering AMD’s computing platforms and managing the graphics and microprocessor product development teams.
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I first met Rick a bit over 10 years ago. Rick was a hell of a nice guy and we wish him the best.
 
i would actually guess the impending delay of next gen graphics cards is the culprit.
 
Well I guess this explains why I couldn't find a 6990 when I wanted one and had the money burning in my pockets. Now I'm willing to hold out for the 7000 series so that's a significant loss if others were doing the same. Or the next Nvidia offering; whatever comes first.
 
Well supply issues could go as far back as the 5000 series up till the current 6000 series.
 
BD performance remains a mystery, but it's sounding more and more like the delays are due to production issues more than anything.
 
This isn't good, investors want returns or they want blood. For now they are getting blood.
 
If they fired him over glofo did they have the foresight to arrange other fabs for producing enough to fill the needs of AMD ?
There aren't any others are there ?
 
People are fired from Corporations all thew time. However, it's almost never for non performance.
 
cold&damp said:
no... when/what did you say? i suspected that supply was the issue behind the delay. dont delay the most profitable product (Llano) for the 5% of the market one.
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Reading is fundamental. And you have little understanding of the bigger picture, so don't think that you do.
 
I'm not following Kyle at all on this, anybody else?

If I was a shareholder or an investor and I was looking at the BD launch table. And I say it getting chronically pushed back further and further I'd start to have my doubts about me. Then just before the, presumed, eve of its launch (within lol the next month?) you fire the guy how's overall in charge of getting these chips out in a timely manner?

Its rather silly to not expect people to start connecting dots. They might not correct the right dots together but if they arent thats AMD PR slipping up again. It's the PR's job to make sure the public is getting the right image, or at least the image you want portrayed anyways. If AMD's PR wants people to start painting their own picture of whats going on behind closed doors then dont be surprised when people arent drawing unicorns and rainbows over the BD logo.

Honestly though firing the guy, who you basically pointed to as the primary guy for getting BD out in a timely manner, at this point in time without any real info behind it is just PR silliness.

Hang me out to fry if you want but I'm not the only one thinking it, clearly, so AMD has failed in the PR department yet again. I'm sure that bigger picture will shape up eventually, but that big picture needed to shape up yesterday not tomorrow or the day after.

Just my $.02
 
This doesn't look good.

- Someone who is on the AMD forums daily looking for BD info....
 
Here's my take (pure speculation):

1. New CEO comes in and needs to show he means business. Easiest way to do this is firing someone.

2. At high-level, there are two strong candidates to pin blame on and dismiss. One is your head of sales and/or marketing (depending on the company). The other is the head of engineering.

3. New CEO decides to fire head of engineering, and there are facts that, at first glance, support this. However, if you look closer:

- Why is AMD reliant on GF? Because the AMD/GF contract requires AMD to be reliant on GF for a few years after the spinoff. This isn't engineering's fault, it is legal's

- Why is BD likely not hitting performance targets? (1) AMD is reliant on GF, who is focused on new customers instead of the contractually obligated customers, and (2) you don't spend as much on development as your engineers say you need to to stay at the top of the game


Note that Reed (the new CEO) is not an engineer, but a business person by experience (although w/ an IS degree to start with). He is unlikely to understand how easy it is to constrain engineering, and my opinion is that this firing proves that he is unable or unwilling to understand the constraints AMD CPU engineering has been subjected to in the past few years, instead choosing to blame engineering for the problems getting product to market this year even though the primary causes are beyond their control.
 
Look if you take how corporations work. He was tasked with making sure that global foundries met certain deliverables and apperently it failed at some level. Now in order for any company to have a person to lay blame on so that the investors will react they way they want to they need to make flashy choices. Wether he really did fail to deliver on something hardl matters. Amd is dealing with production delays. Now this may be related to scuttle butt about globalfoundries having issues with 32 nm production. in april amd changed the agreement with global foundries making people believe there were fab issues. Now if he was aware this was going to be a problem and it was going to affect AMD's ability to deliver new products, and it was felt he didnt do enough to mitigate this issue they needed a person to blame. So the buck stops here bit him in the ass. I could be wrong but this is what i am seeing based on what has hit the web. Kyle likely has a better handle on this than i do.
 
sorry about the run on sentences i did a quick post then discovered i couldnt fix it lol
 
I wonder if this has something to do with GF's process being so far behind Intel's? Maybe they feel he wasn't doing everything he could to ensure GF kept pace with Intel?
 
Been hearing alot about Global Foundries having issues supplying the Liano chips.

Hopefully they lined up someone like TSMC to do the rest of the fab work, or their jumping Global Foundries ass for all the issues...
 
AMD today announced that Rick Bergman is leaving AMD. President and CEO Rory Read will serve as interim general manager of AMD’s Products Group. AMD also announced that Paul Struhsaker, 49, has joined the company to lead AMD’s newly-formed commercial business division as the corporate vice president and general manager, Commercial Business Division.

Struhsaker will oversee product management and roadmap planning for AMD’s server, high performance computing and embedded products. He joins AMD from Comcast, where he was senior vice president of engineering responsible for all set-top box platforms and video server applications for the Comcast Video Networks. “I want to thank Rick for his many contributions to AMD and wish him well in his future endeavors.”
 
AMD unfortunately sounds more and more like a place getting buried by out-of-control closed door politics.

Now the "old guard" is leaving, and with it much experience.

Too bad.
 
I wonder what Jerry Sanders think about all of this...

Come on, a company that used to place high value on its collaborators is now doing what every other corporation does.

The worst thing that can happen to a tech company is have it run by financist/businessmen CEOs who knows jack about the tech involved.
 
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